A TIME OF TURMOIL

Ike Willie-Nwobu urges the administration to do more and get the people out of the woods

Nigeria is a country in pain. While the optimists remaining in Nigeria would describe the pains as those of childbirth, the pessimists, optics and skeptics would beg to differ. They would argue that all they can hear is a death rattle.

The transition period was always going to be tough. After the immediate past government Nigeria was left with a mountain to climb. To say that the process has been exhausting and exasperating is to put it mildly.

President Bola Tinubu is the man on the hot seat now, and the early signs would seem to confirm the worst fears of those who sounded the alarm as soon as it became clear that he would be president. His supporters may have a couple of points arguing that he inherited an utter disaster, he is less than a year in office, and is trying his best in the circumstances, but he is not completely blameless in the making of the disaster that Nigeria has become.

In 2015, President Tinubu led the Action Congress, which joined forces with the Congress for Progressive Change to form the All Progressives Congress. He was instrumental in the mammoth electoral upset caused by Muhammadu Buhari in 2015, whom he also supported throughout his tenure, even after it had become clear that he had neither clue on how to run the country nor the glue needed to hold a fractured country together.

A successful election preceded a successful transition in May 2023 and President Tinubu who is supposed to be living his best life having seemingly achieved a lifelong dream, is instead living a nightmare.

He ripped away the contentious fuel subsidy regime in his inaugural address and while Nigerians initially adjusted to their new reality, their optimism about a possible new direction for the country quickly crashed on the shoals of reality.

As the prices of basic goods and services soared, catching large families cold, protests have erupted in some major Nigerian cities as economic conditions have worsened. In Ibadan, which is very much in the heart of the Southwest where the president hails from, many people hit the streets to protest the living conditions.

It would be cruel to pin all of Nigeria’s problems on a man who has been in office for less than a year. Many of the problems Nigerians are experiencing today are decades long. Some of the challenges that have exploded today had boiled in the background for years before the President mounted the saddle.

But some grievances with his administration are justified. He has always been a key member of the All Progressive Congress that has held the country to ransom in the past eight years. His desperation to get into political office put off many people.

The supreme court may have applied the insignia of finality on the 2023 general elections and litigation therefrom when it confirmed Tinubu as winner in October 2023, but doubts remain in many minds, especially in the court of public opinion.

Poverty and insecurity sweep Nigeria at a rate not recently witnessed, and it is a natural for Nigerians to direct a lot of ire towards the number one citizen of the country. On his part, he has called for patience and perseverance, describing the situation as the storm before the calm.

But Nigerians so brokenly betrayed recently are reluctant to trust anyone again, especially someone who is cut from the same cloth.

As hunger continues to gnaw at their innards with ferocious intensity, Nigerians suspect those who govern them. They suspect every word, every action spoken in and from the halls of power. Most damningly, Nigerians suspect those who are asking them to be patient with those who govern them.

It would be easy for the many cynics who congregate Nigeria’s corridors of power to predict, drawing from past experience, that the protests would eventually peter out, and Nigerians would switch to default mode,  and adjust to the slug that life has become in the country. But such conclusions would be mistaken and even dangerous. The youth protests of 2020 showed a country where citizens were finally prepared to unleash pent-up anger.

Ikewilly9@gmail.com